Quantity Theory Revisited

The price of gold fell another ten bucks and that of silver another 28 cents last week. Perspective: if you are waiting for the right moment to buy, the market is offering you a better deal than it did last week (literally, the market price of gold is at a 7.2% discount to the fundamental price vs. 4.6% last week). If you wanted to sell, this wasn’t a good week to wait. Which is your intention, and why?

Gold vs. TMS excl. memorandum items (the latter add several 100 billion dollars to the recent total, but currency & deposit money represent the bulk of TMS-2 – we chose this version because it allowed us to make a longer-term chart). It is obvious that there is no 1:1, instantaneous correlation between the quantity of money and prices – in this case, the gold price – far from it. However, no-one is saying that anyway, as far as we are aware. The purchasing power of money depends on four factors: the supply of and the demand for money, and the supply of and demand for goods and services. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that prices are not independent of the money supply. With respect to the gold price, the chart above simply shows that there are leads and lags between the quantity of outstanding dollars and the gold price – these can certainly be lengthy, but that is what the periods when the two drift apart represent. The gold price (and all other nominal prices in the economy for that matter) would not have experienced such a large long term increase if the money supply had remained stable. Most of the time, changes in the money supply growth are not very useful for forecasting short term trends in the gold price, but the size of the money stock and the price of gold do correlate over the long term. Mises described the effect of inflation (inflation = an increase in the money supply) on prices as follows:

“The course of a progressing inflation is this: At the beginning the inflow of additional money makes the prices of some commodities and services rise; other prices rise later. The price rise affects the various commodities and services, as has been shown, at different dates and to a different extent. This first stage of the inflationary process may last for many years. While it lasts, the prices of many goods and services are not yet adjusted to the altered money relation. There are still people in the country who have not yet become aware of the fact that they are confronted with a price revolution which will finally result in a considerable rise of all prices, although the extent of this rise will not be the same in the various commodities and services.” 

Elsewhere Mises remarks that economic productivity has often matched or even outpaced monetary inflation, and in those periods nominal price increases were occasionally suppressed altogether:

“A sharp rise in commodity prices is not always an attending phenomenon of the boom. The increase of the quantity of fiduciary media certainly always has the potential effect of making prices rise. But it may happen that at the same time forces operating in the opposite direction are strong enough to keep the rise in prices within narrow limits or even to remove it entirely. […] As an actual historical event credit expansion was always embedded in an environment in which powerful factors were counteracting its tendency to raise prices. As a rule the resultant of the clash of opposite forces was a preponderance of those producing a rise in prices. But there were some exceptional instances too in which the upward movement of prices was only slight.” [emphasis added]

Gold is a monetary asset, i.e., the market-chosen money commodity. As such, it behaves like a currency and its long term correlation with USD money supply growth is actually quite pronounced. The supply of gold grows at a very slow pace, and as long as the market treats it like money, its price will tend to rise in the long term relative to currencies with a faster growing supply. In the short to medium term other macroeconomic factors are most of the time more important gold price drivers. It should be noted though that in today’s central bank-administered fiat money system, these other factors also tend to have a lead-lag relationship with money supply growth rates. After all, the latter are driven by central bank policy, which in turn is generally formulated in response to macroeconomic developments. [PT]

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